Applications

The "Ballpool" program is an interactive game using Kinect. The robots moves comically along the movement of the players. It is mainly good for entertainment for kids (e.g., science park, short-term exhivision etc.) but also good for other events such as wedding.

There are two versions in this program: 1. Naive ballpool program and 2. ballpool blocks in which two players help each other to solve problems.

1.Ballpool (First Program)

"NAIST Ballpool" was first programmed in autumn, 2011, 6 months after Microsoft's Kinect is out in the commercial market. Like other "ballpool" stuff everybody can think of, its player interacts with some avatar that imitates his/her motion, surrounded by virtual balls.

2. Ballpool in Nursing Home

After a local exhibition in my university, we brought our prototype system to a nursing home where the author's grandmother stayed. Some elder people participated in a short program. They said they had a good feeling and was interesting. I wanted it to be regular program, but unfortunately there are no one who carries out the program.

3. Ballpool Blocks; Now it's a decent GAME.

And on "Entertainment Computing 2011, Tokyo, Japan," I modified the program so that two persons help each other to build several square blocks.

Now that it was a decent "game," who can play with some other partner.

The goal of this game is to align the blocks vertically so it looks like the answer shown at the top right corner.

4. Wedding Entertainment

What I did in my last single day was withdrawing in a hotel room and to make a fake "wedding cake" in my computer. The cake was cut in "a kinetic way" before the actual cake appeared.

5. Science Park in Israel

An offer came in to my mail box, saying "we want to use your program in a science kids project in Carasso Science Park in Isreal. The people of intellectual property took care of this and we first sold our program. The project seemed successful as long as I saw the article in spring 2014.